Documents are increasingly being stored and processed in electronic form. In a typical scenario, a document that is stored in a designated electronic format can be “opened” and displayed to a user, utilizing a document reader running on a personal computer or other processor-based device. As a more particular example, electronic documents that are stored in a widely-used format known as portable document format (PDF) can be opened and viewed using an Adobe® Acrobat® document reader commercially available from Adobe Systems Incorporated of San Jose, Calif., U.S.A.
Many documents that are of a technical nature, such as journal articles or other publications in technical fields such as science, engineering and medicine, include numerous references to other documents. For example, a given technical publication may include an extensive list of reference citations, typically in a separate “References” section at the end of the publication. Most of these references may be to other documents that are available as PDF files on the Internet.
Unfortunately, the reference citations provided in a given electronic document are often not in the form of respective uniform resource identifiers (URIs) or other types of links that can be used to directly access the corresponding PDF files over the Internet. Instead, a user who wishes to retrieve an electronic copy of a particular cited reference document typically must first perform a manual Internet search using a search engine such as Google® in order to locate the appropriate link to the desired document. This manual approach is time-consuming, tedious, and error-prone, particularly for the researcher who is conducting an extensive search of the prior literature.
Accordingly, a need exists for an improved approach to processing electronic documents that include reference citations.